This invention relates generally to material handling equipment and, more particularly, to apparatus for opening and emptying bags filled with particulate materials.
Various types of machines have been developed for automatically or semi-automatically opening and emptying particulate material filled bags. Such a machine is disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,811,586, which is assigned to the assignee of the present application. Although somewhat effective for their intended purposes, prior bag opening and emptying machines suffered either individually or compositely from a number of disadvantages. Included in these disadvantages were the inability to handle bags composed of certain materials, the inability to handle particulate material filled inner bags retained by a protective outer bag, a requirement that bags be received in a particular orientation thereby requiring manual loading of bags into the machine, an inability to handle torn bags, etc.
The object of this invention, therefore, is to provide an improved particulate material filled bag opening and emptying apparatus that obviates the disadvantages present in prior equipment of that type.